Monthly Archives: March 2015

Behind the crew entered a woman whose ordinary brown skin was threaded with scars on one half of her face, and on the other, gave way to glass and ceramic fittings and an unblinking eye that wasn’t anything natural. Gasps … Continue reading →

Margrét Helgadóttir. The Stars Seem So Far Away Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Signal to Noise Note: I purchased my own copy of Signal to Noise, and received a review copy of The Stars Seem So Far Away from the publisher, Fox Spirit … Continue reading →

Ah, backstory. Everybody hates the info-dump, right? Writers hate how much their readers don’t know, and try to spare them the perils of ignorance; readers hate how much stuff the writer is feeding them (Why are you force-feeding me this … Continue reading →

Yasmin listened, putting her hands up to feel the bells in her tightly twisted braids. They pulled pleasantly on her scalp; she wiggled her ears and they jingled faintly. Jehen looked at her sidelong; even though she was a year … Continue reading →

Notebook and pen. I started writing in pen long before they officially let us handle that deadliest of weapons, so most of my juvenilia are written in ball-point pen in composition books. This is old school, and it’s also evergreen.

The first of the Muse of Research interviews, with Lev Mirov (@thelionmachine on Twitter), has been published on the Skiffy and Fanty Show. Go check it out! This is the short version, 1000 words or so. An extended version will … Continue reading →

There’s a lot of advice out there saying not to use second person, ever. Like any absolute rule, it’s wrong. Decades after reading it, I still remember the chapter about arrest and detention in the first volume of Solzhenitsyn’s GuLAG … Continue reading →